It's long been known that Martin Heidegger was involved with the Nazi regime, and we are still wrestling with the questions this brings up. Was Heidegger really a true believer, or was he just a careerist? Does this affect the way we view his work, particularly Being and Time? Should it? What does it say about Hannah Arendt that she loved such a man? What does it say about her work examining totalitarianism and power? What does it say about the other intellectuals who defended him when the Allies won and the "denazification" (what a word) hearings began? Within the next year, there will be multiple books published, including Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy and Daniel Maier-Katkin's Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness, trying to find answers to these questions. You can pick apart his work, trying to find alignments between his philosophy and the Nazi philosophy. (I won't be doing that. William James once wrote that he only felt like he truly understood Hegel when he was high on nitrous oxide. I feel the same way about Heidegger.)
Heidegger's most famous work, Being and Time, was published in 1927. He didn't join the party until 1933 when he became the rector of the University of Freiburg and used his new enthusiasm to reorganize the school. Many of his critics say they have problems with his work because he never issued an apology for his time in the Nazi party. I'm guessing this is not what they actually want. How does one apologize, exactly, for 12 years spent supporting a political regime, and during the height of his career and intellectual prowess? An apology would be an insult. He did give one interview, printed posthumously, wherein he tried to justify his actions, saying he was trying to save his job. It's an obvious dodge. It doesn't explain why he informed on colleagues, or some of the work Faye cites in Heidegger justifying racism. Heidegger died without giving a real explanation to anyone, including his former lover Arendt, even after she passionately defended him and his work. But even if we had a full confessional from a repentant Heidegger, would that clear things up for us?
The problem is not whether this information is available. It's that we don't know what to do with it. . . .

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)